There has been an invasion of Russia. The imperial palace of Gatchina outside St Petersburg has been overrun by a motley army that has brought its own field kitchens, transports and baggage trains in its wake. Men in Hussar uniforms stride purposefully by, horses champ and stamp, and serfs dressed in woven-leather slippers look on.

But this is no Napoleonic conquest. The BBC has descended in force, breathing new life into War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy's sweeping story of Russian society during the early years of the 19th century.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

'We wrap tomorrow,' says Lily James, fresh from her roles as Lady Rose in Downton Abbey and Cinderella in the Disney fairy tale. Now she is playing Natasha Rostova, the bewitching young countess at the heart of the novel. Natasha loves, and is loved by, many of the other characters – not only her sprawling family but a succession of variously eligible young men. James herself was not proof against Natasha's mercurial charm. 'I had a lot of time to read the book and totally fell in love with Natasha,' she says as she sits patiently in a make-up trailer, wearing a white T-shirt and ripped black jeans, while her hair is plaited, primped and transformed into an empire style.

'She's got such spirit, such soul, and feels things so intensely and extravagantly. At times I can be like her. There's a description of her first ball at her dancing teacher's house and it says she falls in love with every person in the room. She's so open to the world and her heart is so big. I think I fell in love with everyone when I was growing up too, and my friends say I do fall in love really easily.' The BBC team spent time in Vilnius in Lithuania as well as in Russia and was granted unprecedented access to film the young Countess Rostova's first real ball in Empress Catherine's palace. 'That's where the Tsar's ball actually happened,' explains James. 'Being in that room with a Russian orchestra playing the music... those are some of the most breathtaking moments I've had filming. They made my hair stand on end.'

Most Popular

The novel can have the same effect. War and Peace, even more than Anna Karenina or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, defines what we think of as 'Russian-ness'. The two thick volumes are a glittering procession of parties, dissolute playboy drunkards, wolf hunts in the snow, sleigh rides, satin dresses, gamblers, religious maniacs, soldiers, philosophers. There are passionate, ardent souls and cold, calculating rationalists.

As a girl, growing up in London but with heavy Russian influences (my father spoke to me only in Russian until I was about six years old), the novel was a key, a clue, a way into a country that was shut off from us and all but unknowable, yet dominant. For Russians, too, it clarifies their identity. Anna Belorusova, a dear friend who is a Russian military historian, says that War and Peace was the beating heart of their entire schooling during the Soviet era. 'All we cared about then was Natasha's first ball. We skipped the pages of historical theory. But much later I began to understand that Tolstoy does not provide any ready-made formulas to explain life. Instead, he stretches his hand out and helps you through your journey, enabling you to distinguish the real from the false. And encouraging you to carry on in spite of everything.'

Russian pilots in World War II, which they call 'the Great Patriotic War', carried copies of Tolstoy's book with them on sorties. Soldiers took it to the front, and read it in Stalingrad. Even now it has political relevance: this year, the Valdai forum (Russia's political Davos) bore the official title of 'War and Peace'. This was a summit at which President Putin described himself as 'a dove with iron wings'. The subjects Tolstoy deals with are perennial, eternal and inextricably tangled up with the face Russia presents to the rest of the world, and how it sees itself.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

As for me, the copy of War and Peace that I sobbed over and struggled through as a teenager had a cover illustration by my great-grandfather, the Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, who was a friend of Tolstoy and visited him often at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate. For one later novel, Resurrection, Tolstoy would be writing the chapters while Pasternak sketched illustrations to accompany them. Pasternak was summoned to draw the novelist on his deathbed and took his oldest son, my great-uncle Boris, with him. Boris described the dead body of the writer as 'a mountain' in the room. How could I not feel ties and connections linking me to the story as I soaked it all up?

In the more ephemeral world of the BBC dramatisation, the actors embarking on this epic job include swathes of handsome young men, looking particularly dashing in 19th-century military uniforms as they film their last few scenes in the gardens of Gatchina. James Norton, who starred as Duncan Grant in Life in Squares, brings his cheekbones to bear as the heroic Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. However, he is well aware of the burden of expectation placed on him and the rest of the cast. 'I had a Russian theatre director tell me how Prince Andrei had never been played by an actor under 40,' says the 30-year-old, hunched over a table in his trailer in full military regalia. 'War and Peace has a status in the UK but in Russia, when you're

here, you realise how these characters are part of the people. This is their Hamlet. So it's quite something for a British company to come and take it on.' Aneurin Barnard is the brooding, complex Boris Drubetskoy. The blond Jack Lowden, Thomas Wyatt in Wolf Hall, is Natasha's impetuous brother Nikolai Rostov. Paul Dano is the conflicted protagonist Pierre Bezukhov (having previously appeared in 12 Years a Slave, Little Miss Sunshine and as Brian Wilson in the acclaimed Love & Mercy). 'Pierre is always searching for how to be happy,' he says slowly, sitting with me on a step outside in the warm St Petersburg sun. 'He's trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again. The material has high highs and low lows, and it's been a big experience for me. It's strange to be here, at the end.'

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There is a wistful, elegiac feeling about the location, and it's not only because this is June and white nights, so the day will stretch on and on with an endless dusk before the sun rises again. It also seems as though time has stood still, as debutantes in fur trim, hopeful young officers and elderly servants wearing white wigs move quietly around the palace courtyards. I leave the filming to indulge my own Russian fantasy. As the sunset gilds the sky, I join Anna and mount a grand bay Arabian mare, Effendi, to slip through a side gate guarded by great borzois into the gardens of Pavlovsk, the most beautiful of all the summer palaces. We canter through beech and pine woods, past lakes and over bridges and wade through flower meadows so tall that the blooms brush the horses' flanks. The scene, the sounds, scents and sensations are those of two centuries ago. For Gillian Anderson, as the worldly society hostess Anna Pavlovna, whose soirée opens the action both in the book and the series, the experience was equally irresistible. She was attracted by the wonderful cast of older actors, including Jim Broadbent playing Prince Andrei's father, the rigid Old Prince Bolkonsky; Stephen Rea as the odious plotter Prince Vassily Kuragin; Adrian Edmondson as Natasha's ebullient father Count Rostov; and Greta Scacchi as his wife. 'It was a massive, massive undertaking for Andrew Davies,' she acknowledges. 'But he manages to infuse the story with humour.'

Most Popular

The scriptwriter, Davies, will live for ever in our hearts thanks to Colin Firth's white-shirted plunge into a pool as Mr Darcy in 1995. He was up to the daunting challenge of condensing 1,440 pages of Russian history, romance and political theory into six hours of compelling drama. Indeed, it was an offer he couldn't resist. 'I had never read it before but was blown away with what a wonderful story it is. I thought it would be daunting and oppressive, but you just love the characters. It feels modern and fresh – funny and sexy, even. It's mostly about these exciting young people on the threshold of their lives… really it's the most fun I've had since Pride and Prejudice.' It took him six months to do the first draft, 'and that's pretty quick', he says. Then the BBC executives would come down 'for a jolly lunch at the restaurant down the road and then I'd do the rewrites they'd persuaded me were really necessary'.

Tom Harper is the director charged with harnessing all this talent and charming the Russian authorities into allowing the production to go ahead on location. The actors lavish praise on him. 'He and his team are so amazing,' says James Norton, still in costume as Prince Andrei. 'He's never flinched or lost his cool and he's kept it all so playful and light.' Lowden was originally taken aback by Harper, whose credits include The Woman in Black 2 and Peaky Blinders. 'When I first met him I thought, "This guy's 14!" But he's utterly fearless. I think he's done most of it in the casting,' he adds thoughtfully. 'You've got stalwarts who've been in the game a long time, and people who are just starting out.' It's true that Harper does look unfeasibly fresh-faced for his 35 years, clad in a jaunty check shirt and jeans. Hardly the man to command this thespian expeditionary force. But then you see the tired lines under his eyes. He's been working on the project for 18 months, and for six of them non-stop. 'I'm looking forward to a break,' he admits, in between filming the arrival of Prince Andrei and his pregnant wife Lise at his ancestral home (the back entrance of Gatchina), and Broadbent, as Prince Andrei's father, falling off a horse. 'It's taken everything I've got and it's been all-consuming and wonderful and exhausting. The actors have described it as epic, and that's exactly how it is. But they're an astonishing cast – such a delight to work with.'

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The young Irish actress Jessie Buckley has found that the costumes for the spiritual and timid Princess Marya, Prince Andrei's self-sacrificing sister, have helped her 'submerge myself into their rhythms and that way of life. I locked out normality and let Russianness seep into me'. To get into her character's oppressed mindset, 'I always wear a corset. When times are worse it's tighter. When Marya's feeling able to be free it gets looser. I used the structure of it to help me.' Edward K Gibbon, the costume designer, was tasked with helping the stars slip into character as they donned their clothes: 'We've been very authentic with the uniforms, which were all made beautifully for us in Poland. But this is far, far removed from

Jane Austen and vicars and tea parties. This is Russia, it's crazy, it's the Wild East and these characters are rich and decadent. Their society is on the brink of collapse and mayhem is in the air. We wanted that in the clothes, the colours, the patterns. It was a huge responsibility to honour the amazing writing. We didn't want to reinvent the period but we did bring something modern to it. It's a very modern piece.'

One of the most contemporary of the roles is that played by Tuppence Middleton, who recently appeared with Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game. The beautiful Hélène Kuragin is, says the actress, 'a social climber who knows how to get what she wants, and how to work the society around her. She is a forward-moving, free-thinking type of woman who knows how to manipulate men. She's the vixen. But I tried hard not to see her as a villain. She's very liberated and modern: for me, she's a protofeminist.'Middleton found that not only were her costumes vital to conjure the spirit of the book, it was also key to film in Russia. 'There's such a specific feeling about being here,' she explains. 'There's a grandiosity and a melancholy to the story and the landscape reflects the nature of the people. It's important to be among that.'

There is, though, one undercurrent present in the filming that doesn't appear anywhere in Tolstoy's great novel: and that's a fierce rivalry between the two dynasties in the story, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. For the purposes of this series (and mostly because James wasn't allowed to darken her hair as she was promoting Cinderella – quite literally legally blonde), the Rostovs are fair and the Bolkonskys dark. And it's true in the story that the families are sharply contrasting.

The Bolkonskys are grand, intellectual, serious, religious. The Rostovs are fun-loving, bright, improvident, hasty. It's Jim Broadbent who first confesses to me the opposition between the two, as we stand chatting among the trailers, serfs and household servants in Gatchina's courtyard, before he sets off on horseback in character as a curmudgeonly 19th-century paterfamilias. 'We're quite a unit, the Bolkonskys. We've had a lot of good meals, playing Bananagrams together. But there's some competition between the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs. The Rostovs claim there isn't, but there is.' 'It's a bigger thing for them than it is for us,' says Lowden, laughing. 'We're a lot more chilled out about it.' And then he adds: 'The Rostovs are a far more free-thinking, bohemian family. The Bolkonskys are all uptight. Yeah, we're better.' Tolstoy himself would have appreciated this drama within a drama. Christmas comes but once a year, a production like this comes just once in a generation. Essential viewing.

Sign up to the bazaar newsletters now:

Please tick here if you would like to opt out of the Harper’s Bazaar Beauty Bulletin Newsletter.
Hearst: We will also let you know about discounts and great offers from us, tick this box if you'd rather not know about these.
Hearst Partners: would like to let you know about some of their fantastic discounts, special offers, and promotions. We promise you wont be bombarded. Tick here if you would like to receive these.